Monday, 4 June 2012

“Hard Time and Great Expectations”

“Hard Time and Great
Expectations” – a short film based on an extract from “Broken Dreams” by Nick QuantrillThe theme of the 2012 Humber Mouth Literary Festival, maybe
not surprisingly, as we celebrate the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens is “Hard Times and Great Expectations” With
the work of Dickens having obvious links to crime writing, through both its
subject matter and its craft, I wanted to find a way of including my work in
the programme.

“Broken Dreams”, is
a crime novel which in part concerns the case of a missing woman. PI Joe Geraghty is hired by her dying mother,
who wishes to make one last one attempt to find her. More specifically, it’s a story about my home
city of Hull and its defining feature, the fishing industry. But the fishing industry is long gone,
effectively dying at the hands of government policy in the mid-1970s. Being born in 1974, I have no direct line of
reference as to how the city was at its finest, but I can see how the effects
still trickle down now in terms of unemployment and lack of opportunity for
many. The only conclusion I could draw
was that in such circumstances, some people prosper and some people throw the
towel in. “Hard Times and Great
Expectations” in a nutshell.Within “Broken Dreams”,
I knew I had a passage, which voiced this.
Geraghty goes to a pub on Hessle Road, once the heart of the fishing
industry, to talk to the missing woman’s family. It’s there that Geraghty learns that her
father worked the trawlers that would leave the city for months on end and what
a heavy price family life had to pay.The Festival organisers liked the potential of the idea
enough to commission me to work with a local filmmaker. I knew of Dave Lee through his work with the
Larkin 25 project, but more importantly, the short-film he had made with
fellow-Hull writer, Russ Litten, to promote his novel, “Scream If You Want To Go Faster”.
I knew people like Dave and Russ saw the city the same way as I did. So after thrashing out the details, the scene
was moved from the pub to the Pier Head, which overlooks the city’s docks, to
allow details of the city’s regeneration and hopes for the future to be
included.The reading of the piece was given by Hull-born actor, Paul
Popplewell. In my naivety, I simply
thought was a job suited to the writer of the piece. I was very wrong. The two characters are brought to live in a
way I could only dream of, and it is no exaggeration to say I could have cried
tears of joy when Paul pronounced ‘overdose’ as ‘ova-dose’. It was the sound of Hull captured in a single
word. The setting was created for Dave
to lay images over the top of the reading and his film perfectly captures the
beauty and desolation of the industrial backdrop. As the deal to bring green technology to the
Docks of Hull and create thousands of jobs is about to be concluded, I’m proud
that the film captures my city on the cusp of a major change.